Spitzer’s Back, and Good Luck to Him

Give one thing to Eliot Spitzer: he hasn’t lost his ability to grab the headlines. By announcing his return to politics on the Sunday evening after July 4th, one of the quietest news days of the year, he guaranteed himself a burst of publicity. And, sure enough, when I went down to the local supermarket this morning to pick up the papers (I’m still out on Long Island, taking a break) there was his unmistakable mug staring out from the front pages of the Post and the News. And on the coveted right-hand column of the Times front page, the headline: “SPITZER REJOINS POLITICS, ASKING FOR FORGIVENESS.”

Yes, the tabloids’ coverage was snarky—“HERE WE HO AGAIN,” screamed the Post; “LUST FOR POWER,” blared the News—but Spitzer will have expected that. He knows better than anyone that he will never fully live down the prostitution scandal that drove him from the governor’s office, in 2008. The arc of his fall—from future Presidential candidate to client No. 9—was too dramatic to be erased from the public memory, as were the sordid details of the story: the secret liaisons in the nation’s capital, the five-thousand-dollar bank transfers, and, of course, the black ankle socks.

For Spitzer, the important thing is he made the front pages, and he’s back in the game. Having watched Anthony Weiner, whose sexting scandal was much more recent, shoot to the top of the mayoral polls, Spitzer has clearly decided that he isn’t going to let the Post and Ashley Dupré define his identity. In entering the race for City Comptroller, he’s going to brazen it out, as many of his supporters—and perhaps he himself—think he should have tried to do in 2008. “I am going to be on the street corners,” he told the Times. “We’ll be out across the city.”

Maybe I’m in the minority, but for at least three reasons—give me a bit of time, and I can probably think of some more—I say good luck to him.

First, he’s done a good deed for me and all the other writers covering this year’s mayoral elections, turning an obscure fight on the undercard into a bizarre three-sided slugfest involving a disgraced ex-governor, the ex-madam who says she supplied him with hookers (Kristin Davis), and the experienced but little-known Borough President Scott Stringer. Who’s going to miss that televised debate? Not I.

Second, and here I want to avoid getting too Catholic about it, the former governor has surely done his penance. In setting up dates with Dupré and wiring money to an escort agency, he made a mockery of New York’s anti-prostitution laws, betrayed his wife, and acted with astonishing recklessness. For those acts of folly, he lost his job, incurred the wrath of his family, and saw his ambitions for higher office destroyed. If it wasn’t Old Testament justice, it wasn’t a slap on the wrist, either.

Finally, and most important, Spitzer, a rich kid with an old-fashioned populist streak, can make an important contribution to the political debate. In a city and state where the demands of fund-raising force most politicians, Republican and Democrat, to genuflect to the financial industry, Spitzer was, and is, the rare pol willing to stand up to the money men (and money women). Even today, almost a decade after the crusading assault on Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and other Wall Street behemoths that he led from the New York State Attorney General’s office, out here on the Island there are some immensely rich men, such as Ken Langone, the investment banker and co-founder of Home Depot, and Dick Grasso, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, who will never forgive him. (I wrote about Spitzer’s investigation of Wall Street for the magazine in 2003.)

After his fall, during a none too successful second career as a pundit and television presenter, he continued to make the argument for tighter supervision of Wall Street, writing a book on the subject and criticizing the Obama Administration for not taking a tougher stance when it bailed out firms like Citi and Bank of America. He wasn’t right in every instance, but he made some arguments that needed making. And when many people had moved onto other things, he kept at it.

He’s a hard-ass, of course: that’s his great strength and his great weakness. On landing in Albany, he never fully seemed to accept that he had to work with the Republicans in the legislature to get things done. Instead, he tried to bully them into submission—a strategy that proved disastrous.

In the coming weeks, much like Weiner, Spitzer will be coming on all humbled and evolved. Will New Yorkers really believe that? I doubt it. If the voters do give serious consideration to his candidacy, it won’t be because they think there’s a “new Spitzer.” Mainly, it will be because they remember the old Spitzer, the Rottweiler who stood up to Grasso and Langone and Sandy Weill. For all his faults, they quite liked having him around.

Now that he’s done his five years in the wilderness (and on CNN, which for him was pretty much the same thing), my early guess is that they’ll give him another chance to earn their trust. At this stage, Spitzer doesn’t necessarily deserve the Comptroller’s job, and he can’t just walk into it: Stringer is a dedicated public servant who has proved an able Manhattan Borough President, and he’s already garnered a lot of Democratic support in this year’s race. But the former governor has every right to compete for office, and he’ll be going all in. That, we can be sure of.

Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty.

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